Chapters
Shownotes Transcript
You're a podcast listener, and this is a podcast ad. Reach great listeners like yourself with podcast advertising from Lipson Ads. Choose from hundreds of top podcasts offering host endorsements, or run a reproduced ad like this one across thousands of shows to reach your target audience with Lipson Ads. Go to LipsonAds.com now. That's L-I-B-S-Y-N-Ads.com.
I only recently started napping myself. I always try to explain it as like the world is so exciting. Once I'm up, I'm up. But as I've gotten older, naps have become more appealing and to some extent, maybe just unavoidable. You could also try having a newborn daughter. That might help you take a nap. That'll, you know, force it into you.
There's a couple steps between where I am right now and that point in time, Elliot, but I'll take it under consideration.
Hello and welcome to the FiveThirtyEight Politics Podcast. I'm Galen Druk. When I left work on Friday, I assumed that we would be starting today's podcast by covering an ongoing government shutdown. Listeners, that was not to be. And so today we're going to take a look at the compromises that kept the government open, at least for 45 days, and what it all means for Kevin McCarthy's speakership.
Also, more news. California has a new senator designate after Senator Dianne Feinstein passed away last week. Governor Newsom appointed LaFonza Butler president of EMILY's List over the weekend. And so now the big question is, will she join the already crowded primary in California for a full term starting in 2024? Well, I guess the term will actually start in 2025, the election being in 2024.
And I know you have all been waiting with bated breath for us to finally come to some kind of rigorous, data-based conclusion about how often Americans think about the Roman Empire.
We just might be able to do that today. And if you are wondering what I'm talking about, it's a TikTok trend. Just hold tight for a couple minutes and I will explain. And lastly, we're going to share a couple pointers on what to make of outlier polls. Here with me to do it all is Director of Data Analytics, Elliot Morris. Great to have you back on the podcast, Elliot. Hey, Galen. I'm so happy to be here today. I'm happy you're here. Also with us is Senior Elections Analyst, Nathaniel Rakich. Great to have you too. Hey, Galen.
And also here with us is co-author of Politico Playbook and ABC News contributor Rachel Bade. Welcome back to the podcast. I'm also very happy that you're with us. Thanks, Galen. Let's rock on. Let's rock on. And we're going to begin. I know there's so much news today. There's everything I just mentioned. And then there's also the Supreme Court term starts today.
Trump's civil trial in New York surrounding inflating the values of his properties also starts today. So we are skipping over a couple topics in order to talk about this very, very, very important topic, which is...
which is how often Americans, and perhaps men in particular, think about the Roman Empire. This all started with a TikTok trend involving women asking the men in their lives, husbands, brothers, boyfriends, whatever, how often they think about the Roman Empire. And that trend went viral several weeks ago. And the pop consensus became that
Men think an awful lot about the Roman Empire and that women don't really and don't really understand why all these men in their lives are so often thinking about the Roman Empire. So we got this question from listener Amar proposing the gender divide as the topic of a good or bad use of polling segment. He writes...
It's been covered widely by various media organizations over the last few weeks, but many seem to take the gender divide at face value and infer all sorts of things from it without considering methodology at all. My interpretation is that this is rife with bias, particularly non-response bias.
such that the gender gap may be uninterpretable. But maybe I'm overvaluing the many potential biases in the study design, and there is some true gender effect at play here. So we do have actual polling on this. But before we get to the hard numbers, I'm curious, do you think we can discern anything from just this TikTok trend alone, which is what most of these articles have been written about? Nathaniel, why don't you kick us off? Nathaniel
No, I mean, I think we can discern entertainment value and that's not nothing. But obviously in terms of data, like it's anecdata at best. It's anecdata at best. Okay, we're going to go through everyone and get a response. Rachel, what do you think?
Oh, man, I wouldn't have the slightest clue on the polling question. I will just tell you when I saw this trend sort of take off, my reaction was men are so weird. Like I actually have a three minute in my day. I'm thinking about what my daughter's going to eat, the laundry that needs to be folded, the dishes in the sink. I am not thinking about the Roman Empire. You guys are so weird. Okay.
Okay, well, then let's consider this to be one person who at least takes the trend. Because I think most people were sort of taking this trend at face value and saying, wow, men are weird. They think about the Roman Empire a weirdly large amount of the day or the year or whatever. Okay, so Elliot, weigh in here. Well, I was really hoping, Galen, you were about to talk about your henna...
tattoo SPQR. And I feel like you were so close to saying it and then you didn't. Elliot is referring to Twitter activity, which is as this whole thing was swirling around and people were posting jokes about their thoughts, men in particular, their thoughts on the Roman Empire. When I was a teenager, I got a henna tattoo on my forearm that said SPQR, which is of course the abbreviation for Sinatus Populus Que Romanus, which is the symbol for the Roman Republic.
Which is to say that, yes, as a teenager, I was guilty. I will say I have not thought about the Roman Empire all that much since. But yes, as a teenager, I did think about the Roman Empire. So maybe all these guys are just stuck in your teenage years, Galen. Perhaps. Nathaniel, that is to say, there sometimes might be something to anecdata. Although we really like to stick to the polls, we wouldn't have polled this if not for the trends, which might have gotten at something deeper about society, right? No, that's true. And the polling data that we got back ended up...
somewhat supporting the claim. So it was interesting. Okay. We'll get to that in a second, but Elliot, uh, give us your own thoughts first. I would be hesitant. I mean, you're just highlighting outliers at that point, right? For viral. I mean, there's anything on Twitter representative, right. Uh, or Tik TOK or anywhere. So Twitter isn't real life as the politics. Yeah. It's probably not a representative sample, but usually, you know, at the same time, like this stuff doesn't get conjured out of nowhere. Like Rachel said, men are weirdos. Um,
If you had to pick, which is closer to real life, Twitter or TikTok? Oh, God. Which one has more users? You know what? The scientific answer is it depends on the demographic you're trying to reach.
I want to put forward totally unsupported by data that it's TikTok, right? Like Twitter is full of just like angry people talking about politics all day and like, I guess, porn and like a few other things like memes and whatever. But TikTok is like normal people who don't want to think about politics, who are excited by whatever viral trend might be like Taylor Swift and Travis Kelsey and doing little dances.
grandma's going viral. It's also people who are trying to like snag attention. So, you know, and go viral in some way. So is that really representative of real life? I don't know. I do have some data from 2021 from the Pew Research Center, which found that 23% of American adults said they use Twitter and 21% said they use TikTok. So roughly equivalent, although I definitely agree that the user bases are probably quite different. And so it depends on which one you're interested in.
Okay, so let's bring the data to bear on this. You guys asked respondents how often they think about the Roman Empire, and this is the gender split they found. So there were a lot of options here. You could say it was every day, most days, about once a week, about once a month, about once a year, less often than once a year, never, or not sure.
Maybe the most indicative number here is for never. I never think about the Roman Empire. 53% of women said never and 30% of men said never. So every day, 4% of men, 1% of women. God bless those 4% of men. Most days, another 4% of men and 0% of women said
about once a week, 6% of men and 3% of women, about once a month, 14% of men, 10% of women, about once a year, 14% of men, 10% of women. And I'll stop because I don't want to give people a headache from all of those numbers. It's all to say that, yes, YouGov found that there is a gender divide. And so my question is,
Have people been primed to answer this question, making this poll now useless? Or would you think like most people have never heard of this TikTok trend and this is in fact good data? No, I'm sure that most people have not heard of this TikTok trend. Many people in my real life had not heard of it. So I'm pretty confident that this is genuine. So famously, as we've said many times on this podcast, the data can tell us what, but it can't necessarily tell us why.
Rachel, you were the first to offer the explanation that men are just weird, which I support. But if we're digging around for explanations as to why there might be this gender imbalance, what would you say other than men are weird? Well, not to stereotype men, but, you know, I guess... Stereotype us. No, come at us, Rachel. Come at us. There's just some sort of macho fascination. The sort of, like, men being, you know...
Having this sort of testosterone streak that like, you know, the Roman Empire is sort of known for. I don't know. You've got gladiators, people fighting. And then, of course, the stereotype women were thinking about, you know, putting out the next fire and like the family planning and that sort of thing. I have no idea if what I'm saying is truthful, but like I guess looking beyond the numbers, that would be sort of the stereotype at least.
Yeah, usually when pollsters try to get to the why, they'll do focus groups or follow-up interviews with respondents in a poll, which we don't have in this situation. But if you could treat some of the TikTok commentary like focus groups, it seems like a common explanation was that
the inclination of men to sort of mansplain is the term and look for historical analogies for things that might be going on in society today. So the suggestion was that like men might be thinking about the Roman empire because they like to explain to people that like, well, we are in our own era in American politics or American society, sort of an empire in decline. And like, this is what happens when
I don't know, the debt balloons and you get involved in foreign wars or whatever, whatever. I think that was another explanation. I don't know if that has Nathaniel and Elliot between the men like gladiators and men like to explain things with historical anecdotes.
do you have another option or is one of those persuasive? I mean, I think there's probably something to the men like gladiators hypothesis, but I also think there's probably a meta aspect to this kind of like what you just said Galen, but like going beyond that, I think there is, there are probably to the reader's question. There are some response biases here where I think that probably men, when they get asked this question, think,
Oh, the Roman Empire is capital I important. And I consider myself a capital I important person who thinks about politics and history. And so I'm going to say that I think about the Roman Empire more than I actually do. So they're just a bunch of liars. Right. Whereas women are like, no, why would I think about the Roman Empire more?
Like Rachel said, there are more pressing things. So I think there may be some of that involved as well. I do want to defend my fellow men in the poll. A majority of men, 52%, said that they never or think about it less than once a year. So I do think it is exaggerated where the share of men who said that they think about it at least once a week was what?
14% doing the math. So like, I do think that like the tic-tac trend, like makes it seem like, oh, men are thinking about the Roman empire all the time when in fact a majority are still not thinking about it basically ever. But I do think that the gender divide obviously does say something. And I think there are a couple of different possible explanations. Yeah. I think you can go multiple ways with it on, on the polling angle. I think maybe the gender bias here is not how much men think about the Roman empire. It's how much
their or how much they're encouraged to say they think about the Roman Empire, but just how much they're encouraged to say they think about anything at all. So if you go through the rest of the questions asking about, do you think about World War II or the fall of and rise of this empire as an example, there's a big gender divide in the same direction, no matter what the question is. So maybe that speaks to like our performative culture as men to just know everything like you were saying earlier with the mansplaining aspect, Galen. Yeah.
Well, but a lot of those are also topics that are kind of similar to their, you know, wars and historical and kind of what like Rachel was saying. And gladiators. Yeah. Gladiators. Right. All those...
Men are also, like, encouraged in history class, whereas women aren't. That's a very blanket statement I'm going to get canceled for saying. Yeah, I'm not sure I even know what that means, Elliot. That has downstream consequences. Well, like... Women now outperform men in basically every educational facet in America. But history, I mean, like, when you... Like, history has focused a lot on men. I mean, and that's a problem, of course, you know? Like, women over, you know, centuries were sort of just...
the wives and the mothers. And so like, that's another thing that Elliot could be referring to, not necessarily how women perform in history classes, but just the fact that history overwhelmingly revolves around men who made the decisions for thousands of years. Yeah. I'm not talking about what I'm not talking about differences in performance, but in what like you're encouraged to study and think about as a man from your teachers. So I have some data on this as well. According to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2014,
only 40% of bachelor's degrees in history went to women. Well, there you go. Okay, so... There's a reason they call history the dads and grads book category at bookstores. So I think I don't have the gender breakdown for this data. Sadly, Ipsos, this is a bad use of polling. But to make some broader comparisons, as opposed to just to World War II or whatever, Ipsos asked, how often do you think about the following categories
Sex, God, climate change, Princess Diana, and the Roman Empire. So a diversity of topics there. For people who said they often or sometimes think about the following, sex was 74%. God was 74%. I feel like there has to be some trolling in there that that's exactly the same number. Climate change was 63%. Princess Diana was 21%. And the Roman Empire was 15%.
Which is to say, like, I really want the gender breakdown because Princess Diana obviously feels, while it is a historical topic, a more feminine historical topic. I mean, just by dint of her being a woman and also the stereotypes about who might be interested in the royal family. So I don't know. Is there anything to make of those numbers without the gender breakdown? Princess Diana is women's Roman Empire. Is that the idea? Yeah.
I object. I don't think about Princess Diana either. I think about none of these things. I might think about God probably more than Princess Diana. Elliot's breaking news on the 538 Politics podcast. Elliot Morris doesn't think about God, sex, climate change, Princess Diana, or the Roman Empire. Wow. Just no thoughts in my head. None.
All you think about, all you think about are the numbers. Before we actually do get ourselves canceled, we're going to move right along and we're going to talk about what is going on in Washington and why a shutdown was avoided over the weekend.
You're a podcast listener, and this is a podcast ad. Reach great listeners like yourself with podcast advertising from Lipson Ads. Choose from hundreds of top podcasts offering host endorsements, or run a reproduced ad like this one across thousands of shows to reach your target audience with Lipson Ads. Go to LipsonAds.com now. That's L-I-B-S-Y-N-Ads.com.
You're a podcast listener, and this is a podcast ad. Reach great listeners like yourself with podcast advertising from Lipson Ads. Choose from hundreds of top podcasts offering host endorsements, or run a reproduced ad like this one across thousands of shows to reach your target audience with Lipson Ads. Go to LipsonAds.com now. That's L-I-B-S-Y-N-Ads.com.
Congress avoided a shutdown over the weekend by passing a continuing resolution that will extend current government spending for 45 days. In the House, 209 Democrats joined 126 Republicans to pass the bill. And in the Senate, 39 Republicans joined 49 Democrats and three independents to pass the bill. So, Rachel,
Rachel, you have a better sense than pretty much anyone of how this all played out and why a government shutdown was avoided. Can you give us the tick tock of that? Because even I think Saturday morning, I was seeing people being like, well, one day until the shutdown. So it must have been things happened in the span of hours. Absolutely. I will say no one saw this coming. Everybody in Washington. I mean, lawmakers on both sides of the aisle were telling me
that it was going to happen. And the question was just, you know, how long will a shutdown last? But yeah,
Surprisingly, Speaker Kevin McCarthy ended up caving at the last minute. And again, this was surprising to me because I was hearing from his inner circle just as recently as a couple days ago that they thought in order for him to save his job, given that conservatives have been threatening to oust him as speaker, that he would have to embrace a shutdown fight for a while, even though, you know, he might not want to and that he knew there would be political consequences if he did that. I do...
I do think there were always questions about what he could achieve politically and strategically from a shutdown fight. I mean, McCarthy seemed to think that he could get something. But the reality is that in these sort of shutdown fights over the years, the party that makes the demand never gets what they want. And they usually pay the political price, like polling ends up showing that, you know, they're to blame for a shutdown and they get hit. But McCarthy seemed to think
Well, maybe he was just, you know, faking it, telling his members this, that if they talked tough, that they might get some sort of concessions on steeper spending cuts in a short-term government extension. And then also a border crackdown, which is something Republicans have been talking a lot. The problem for him was that Republicans tried to pass a Republican bill that did all of those things, continued funding, uh,
cut, made steep cuts and secured the border or, you know, cracked down at the border. But his own party, actually, including the members that actually want to oust him, ended up sinking that bill. They were not able to pass it to the House. And that ended up undercutting any leverage McCarthy may have had in a shutdown showdown. And so once he realized that, it looks like he pivoted very quickly to decide, like, this is not a fight.
worth having. We're not going to get anything because I can't even rally my own troops around a Republican proposal. And he ended up, you know, just caving on this and passing funding levels that Democrats had passed, you know, before when they controlled all of Washington. So a really significant fold on his part.
In both the House and Senate, there were clear majorities of Republicans that supported a continuing resolution. But obviously, the divide was within the Republican Party. Democrats were unanimous in both cases. What is that division specifically? So the 90 House members who are Republican who voted against it, like that's obviously a lot bigger than just the Matt Gaetz contingent. Like what are they looking for?
Yeah, I mean, most Republicans who have been up on the Hill for a long time, again, they know the history of this, that you don't win in a shutdown fight. I mean, funding the government is a basic duty that the Constitution lays out for Congress. You know, they have control of the purse strings. And
I think a lot of Republicans knew that people were going to get hurt from a shutdown. I mean, there were already stories. ABC News did a bunch of really great stories about how people were going to be potentially impacted by this, not getting a paycheck, getting furloughed, living paycheck to paycheck and not being able to pay bills, having to choose between eating and childcare and showing up to work.
The possibility of air traffic controllers not showing up to work and the airports being thrown into chaos. And then, of course, we've got to remember the economy right now. We're sort of teetering on the edge of a potential recession. And Republicans, most Republicans know that this is like touching a hot stove. Like you just don't do it. Right.
And so there was just like this logic, the logical argument for them not to pick this fight in the first place. And I will also mention that, you know, McCarthy had actually struck a funding deal with the White House much earlier this year as part of the debt ceiling negotiations. He actually ended up going back on that deal to sort of cater to this group of very small conservatives. But a lot of Republicans privately will acknowledge that this is all sort of for naught, that these funding levels have already been laid out and
law and in a bipartisan agreement. And so there's just been a question by a lot of them about, you know, is this really worth picking this fight and seeing the political blowback when we could lose majority in 2024? Speaking of political blowback, there was some polling ahead of all of this looking at what Americans made of a possible government shutdown and what the repercussions might be. Elliot and Nathaniel, how were Americans approaching this?
I mean, I think Rachel got it right in that the side that gets the blame tends to be the side making the demands that wants to attach government funding to something else. And that has historically tended to be Republicans. In 2013, they wanted to defund Obamacare. In 2018 to 2019, the longer shutdown, Trump wanted funding for his border wall. This time, obviously, they were the ones making the demands about lowering spending.
Interestingly, the one time that Democrats kind of put a precondition on government funding was the first shutdown in 2018 when they were upset about DACA. And that was the time that Democrats got the most blame in the polls, but Republicans still got more of it. But I think that was probably more about the political environment we were in at the time. 2018 obviously was a very strong year for Democrats in the election, and the national mood is also very pro-democratic.
But I think maybe if you kind of normalize for that, maybe you see Democrats getting a majority of the blame. What I thought that interesting this time around, and you have a situation where obviously there's a lot of debate about what kind of political environment we're in. You have special elections being really good for Democrats. You have polls of the general election being generally tied. You have Biden being extremely or
fairly unpopular. But the polls that we did see showed actually the Democrats were getting, I thought, a surprising amount of the blame considering that they weren't kind of the ones who were instigating this. And maybe that does have to do with Biden's unpopularity. So I'll cite a couple of examples. So Monmouth asked which party should take the blame. 48% said Biden or congressional Democrats. 43% said congressional Republicans. So
um navigator research also asked a similar question 34 blamed biden and democrats and that 32 blamed republicans and then 27 blamed both equally which of course is kind of the easy way out so i think there is an element of people falling into their normal partisan patterns and expressing their displeasure with in this case biden and democrats
by saying they're to blame for the shutdown, even if maybe they're not following as closely and they might not think that Biden and Democrats are to blame for the shutdown if it had happened, if they had been following every single detail. One just thing to note on that, I was really surprised by that polling too. And I did talk to some folks
over the administration who, I mean, who knows, because the shutdown was averted, but they were feeling pretty darn confident that those numbers were going to shift as soon as people started to actually tune into the shutdown fight and figure out what was going on. And I do think they were actually banking a little bit on a shutdown fight and all the chaos to try to help Biden's numbers. I know later in the show, we're going to talk about some of the polling showing Trump up
above Biden, you know, by quite a few points. And I, I was hearing from Dems that they actually were kind of welcoming this shutdown fight because they thought they could boost their own numbers and get, you know, people to blame Republicans and start to rally around Dems. I mean, who knows if it would have come to that, but they were strategically sort of banking on that in the next couple of weeks.
I want to move on to what is now the more salient question, which is, will McCarthy keep his job? Right. So representative from Florida, Matt Cates, was on the Sunday shows yesterday saying that he's going to bring a motion to vacate to the floor this week.
I don't know how soon it's going to happen. Maybe by the time people are listening to this, it has happened. I should say this has only happened. What is it? One other time in American history that there's been a motion to vacate brought to the floor and it failed. So what's the process here and how likely is it that McCarthy is going to be out of a job because of this agreement? Yeah. So as, as we record right now, it looks like Matt Gates is actually getting ready to go to the floor. So this is going to happen. It's going to dominate the week. Um,
As for process, it's a bit tedious in the fact that this hasn't happened in over a century. A lot of people don't have a lot of clarity on the process. But we do know is when he offers his motion, McCarthy basically has two days to respond to this before it comes up to a vote. And obviously, you need a majority of the House to remove the speaker. But McCarthy is going to be offering what's called a motion to table. That's basically a motion to kill this effort completely.
And he can do that as soon as Monday. He could do it Tuesday. Wednesday basically has 48 hours to decide how to do that. As for whether or not he will keep his job, I mean –
People like to say that reporters and Washington, you know, political watchers underestimate McCarthy all the time. He actually has survived a lot longer than I thought he would survive. And I've covered him for years. I thought the Freedom Caucus would come for him a long time ago. But like with this slim majority, he can really only afford to lose a
five, four Republicans. If he loses five, his job is gone. And there's one big question right now everybody is asking is, you know, will Democrats actually step in to help McCarthy keep his gavel? And I spent all of Sunday working the phones after Gates said he was going to be doing this this week.
And I can tell you all I heard from Democrats was just total fury at McCarthy. They were complaining about how he introduced and made them vote on a continuing resolution on Saturday without giving them any time to read the bill. He went on TV on Sunday morning and accused Democrats of being responsible for the shutdown brinksmanship when we all know that that's not true. It was very much Republicans' fault.
who drove this to the brinksmanship. And he also did it just a few hours after Democrats helped put up the votes in the House to actually help him pass the continuing resolution. So Democrats also say they can't trust him. He has gone back on his...
spending caps deal that he cut with the White House earlier this year. They're still furious with him at being the person who almost single-handedly helped resurrect Donald Trump's career after January 6th. They're angry at him over impeachment. And
They frankly don't want to save him right now. Wait, wait, wait. Can I just ask one question here before we go any further? Which is, aren't McCarthy and the Democrats just doing their job? Like, McCarthy's job is to blame the Democrats and trash them on television. And Democrats' job is to blame McCarthy and trash them to reporters like yourself. Like, would we expect anything? But then when it actually comes time to, like,
come to some sort of agreement, potentially save McCarthy in the face of a more conservative member of the Republican House caucus becoming speaker. When push comes to shove, is this all sound and fury? Or do you think there's like, to be a little stereotypical, a signal in all of this noise? No, I definitely think this is real. And just to your former point about, you know, isn't this just Democrats and Republicans blaming each other?
To an extent, yes. But usually you see leaders, when you have to cut a bipartisan deal, they don't go out and sort of blast each other if they rely on the other side to put up votes. Like that's, you don't often see that. And the other thing I would say is McCarthy
He made a deal with the White House. Like he made an agreement and then he backtracked on it before the ink was even dry when it comes to spending cap levels. That is something that we don't see in Washington. Usually when there's a deal struck, leaders stick to it. So like this is a whole new, you know, territory, all new territory in terms of somebody making a deal and then going back on it. So Democrats, they absolutely have a right to sort of be furious about that. As for Democrats,
Could McCarthy be replaced with somebody who's even worse in the eyes of Democrats? I'll just say I don't think that that's possible. Like somebody like a Marjorie Taylor Greene is not going to get the support from House Republicans to lead the House and to become speaker. They have conservatives have put forward a number of names,
House Majority Whip Tom Emmer, House Majority Leader Steve Scalise. A lot of these guys actually do have relationships with Democrats, and they don't have reputations, at least right now, of making deals and breaking them or of making promises and breaking them or of lying. That is something that's very specific to McCarthy, and it is a problem for his own members, and it's a problem for Democrats. And so...
I do think the suggestion that, oh, you can't beat someone with no one, which is what McCarthy is going to keep saying over and over this week. I do think it's a little overblown because there are other House Republicans out there who can do this job and who do have the support of people like a Matt Gaetz and people like, you know, a moderate, like a
Mike Lawler in New York, who is in a Biden district or something like that. So I don't think it's impossible to see a different speaker rise. Okay. So it sounds like there's a scenario where McCarthy is in trouble. How do Democrats play all of this, given the fury that you've described and this fact that they're going to have opportunities to either help or withhold help from McCarthy this week?
Yeah, so Jeffries has been telling members that he wants them to all stick together. He thinks that if, you know, they're going to vote against McCarthy or vote to allow this to come to the floor, that they should all be...
you know, with one unified voice. And they're going to be meeting to talk about this. I do think there's a question about whether some moderate Democrat from like a redder district could actually break with Jeffries if Jeffries decides that the party should not help McCarthy and might help
the Speaker anyway. And with the motion to table, McCarthy is expected to get, you know, 200 plus Republicans voting to table this and effectively kill it. He might only need a few Democrats to help him do this. And so we'll have to see if, you know, some of these mod dems actually break away, make some sort of deal with McCarthy and help save him. But we should note that if McCarthy ends up killing this whole motion with help from Democrats, it's
That actually is going to be problematic for him in the long run as well, because Matt Gaetz has said he's going to do this every day until McCarthy is gone. The phrase he uses is we'll open the House with the prayer, the pledge and the motion to vacate. And if McCarthy is relying on Democrats to save his speakership, you're going to actually see more House Republicans say that's not OK. And they're going to start to break away and join the Gaetz crew, which means more Republicans supporting Gaetz,
which means you need more Democrats to save McCarthy. And at some point, he's going to hit his threshold on Democrats, if he even gets any, to help him on this. So I think, you know, this could possibly go multiple rounds. And it's just going to get increasingly worse for McCarthy as it goes on. Do you think they'll be able to resolve that before the next shutdown debate in 45 days? I don't know. I mean, the speakership fight in January went, you know, a full week, 15 rounds.
I mean, you would think they would have it done in 45 days, but it's just going to be total chaos. So who knows? I read your playbook this morning and it sounded like there was a potential win-win for Democrats in this scenario where what are the things that are on the table that Democrats want that McCarthy could provide if, you know, they are going, he's going to keep his speakership and they're going to keep government funded. Yeah.
And one thing that Democrats want that Republicans are more wary of is funding for Ukraine. And one thing that Republicans want that Democrats are more wary of is money for Ukraine.
securing the border, addressing the border. At this point, there are a lot of different things that folks want, like one actual securing the border through, you know, building a physical wall and more agents, but also a revamping of the asylum process, which now even Democrats are saying is broken. And like, I don't know, it would seem to me that Joe Biden would want to resolve the border crisis.
before the election next year, because it's clear that Democrats have started turning on him. Like, you know, I'm here in New York City where this morning an aide to Mayor Eric Adams was on television saying it's up to the president to, you know, stop migrants from coming across the border. Like, that's what's
sort of dragging the city down. That's what's creating the problem. And so, you know, you're now hearing Democrats turn on Biden. And this would seem like a win-win. You know, they say, OK, we had to move on the border because this was the only way that we could sort of get funding for Ukraine and keep the government open. And this was the compromise that we came to. But at the same time, this is probably in some ways a solution that they want to an electoral problem that they have.
Yeah, I think politically it's next to impossible to do that. I mean, I know there's a lot of action happening on the border right now. If you look at polling, Americans are really concerned about it. But usually when you talk about border issues in Washington, the sort of general consensus has been, the conventional wisdom has been that when you address the border, you also address the
immigration writ large in this country. You know, what do you do with DREAMers? What about their parents? What do you do with the 12 million plus undocumented migrants who are here? And when it comes to immigration and those sort of questions, Congress has been trying to deal with this for decades, and they've not been able to. You know, a bipartisan group in the Senate came very close a number of years ago, but then, you know, it just died in the House. And it's hard for me to imagine that something
that is basically considered like the third rail of politics for lawmakers, that they can actually come together on some sort of agreement in this very toxic moment where 2024 is just around the election, where they will address the border and address a lot of these, you know, immigration concerns that people have. So I'm really, really skeptical about that. But as for concessions that Democrats could get, they are making wish lists.
And a couple of them include, you know, making McCarthy basically stop the impeachment of Joe Biden. You mentioned the Ukraine package. The White House really wants that. And by the way, Matt Gaetz is out there saying that McCarthy cut a secret deal with the White House for Democratic support in the House on the continuing resolution over the weekend, saying that basically that he would put
the Ukraine aid on the House floor, which means that it would actually pass because there is bipartisan support for that. If that is true, and we don't actually know if this is true because McCarthy and the White House, they're not commenting on this right now. But if that is true, McCarthy will lose support from additional Republicans. I can tell you that for sure. As for other concessions, Democrats are talking about power sharing agreements where they get
more slots on committees or have control over the House Rules Committee that basically governs the floor. And we should note that all of these things, any one of these things, if McCarthy agrees to them, he's toast. I mean, even if he doesn't agree to them and he just uses Democratic votes to save his speakership, I'm still convinced he's toast because I think Republicans will start to turn on him in more numbers, as I mentioned earlier. But
these are things that he cannot give and actually think that he has a future, you know, leading House Republicans. It's just not feasible. So a lot of, in a lot of ways, all the speculation about this is kind of like, you know,
More like a West Wing fantasy, but it's really interesting to talk about, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I think the best way for him to survive is actually to try to pick off Matt Gaetz's allies who say they're trying to oust him because there is a possibility that he could do that. And I think...
Matt Gaetz and his team, they were the ones who single-handedly sank the Republican spending bill that McCarthy wanted to bring to the floor, thus undercutting Republicans' negotiating hand. And there's actually a lot of fury by conservatives at the time.
Matt Gaetz and his crew for doing that. So even though there's a lot of conservatives in the House who, frankly, hate McCarthy and might otherwise be disposed to support him or support his ouster as speaker, a lot of those members right now are actually mad at Matt Gaetz.
And I'm talking about people like Freedom Caucus leader Scott Perry. If you were looking online on Sunday after Gates announced that he was going to bring a motion to vacate to the floor, people like Mark Levin, conservative talk show host, calling Matt Gates and his allies clowns, saying they're the reasons that the House got jammed by the Senate and had to accept these higher spending levels. So...
I do have a question about whether Matt Gaetz is going too early right now. I do not think that he has reached his peak sort of influence moment, peak sort of power in terms of getting McCarthy out. I actually think that comes later in November when lawmakers are negotiating long-term spending deals because I think McCarthy is going to have to cave again and accept the White House spending deals that he agreed to this spring. And when he does that, it's not just going to be Matt Gaetz and his friends who are mad.
mad. It's going to be a bunch of Republicans, both in Congress and on the outside, Republicans who right now are furious at Matt Gaetz. So if McCarthy wants to survive, his best shot right now is not to turn to Democrats. His best shot is to really
blame Gaetz for the chaos, accuse Gaetz of working with Democrats to oust him, say that Gaetz is sort of the instigator here and try to rally Republicans against Gaetz and keep his gavel that way. I'll just say, as a first approximation, if you're thinking through how long Speaker McCarthy lasts, if you begin your speakership with 15 ballots and weeks of delay, then that's usually a pretty bad sign for your long-term prospects.
I'm looking at betting markets right now. Hold on. Will Kevin McCarthy remain speaker through October 15th? 91% yes. December 31st, 82% yes. Okay. So we got some contrarian voices on this podcast. The Scottish teens are pretty optimistic about Kevin McCarthy's career. But they also seem particularly badly suited to judging this issue, which is like...
Something you need a lot of like insider specialty knowledge to judge. Well, okay. I mean, not to open wounds here, but the last time Rachel was on, she was pretty positive about her prediction that the government would shut down. I was! I cannot believe it. I was also pretty positive that he wouldn't get the gavel. So, you know.
You know? So basically none of us know anything. So Nathaniel, take that insider knowledge and shove it. That's fair. That's fair. Or you should go on these markets and short the conventional wisdom of the 538 Politics podcast. Don't do that. I did not have it on my bingo card that McCarthy was going to cave that early. Definitely not. Nobody did. Nobody did. All right. Well...
Let's stick around Washington and move on to a conversation about the new senator from California.
You're a podcast listener, and this is a podcast ad. Reach great listeners like yourself with podcast advertising from Lipson Ads. Choose from hundreds of top podcasts offering host endorsements, or run a reproduced ad like this one across thousands of shows to reach your target audience with Lipson Ads. Go to LipsonAds.com now. That's L-I-B-S-Y-N-Ads.com.
California Senator Dianne Feinstein passed away last Friday at 90 years old. Condolences to all who knew her. Of course, this is a sad event, but also we are, for the purposes of an electorally focused politics podcast, going to talk about the politics of it all. So there was already a hotly contested primary to replace her after she'd already announced that she would not be running for re-election in 2024. The main contenders were Representatives Adam Schiff, Katie Porter, and Barbara Lee.
Now, Governor Newsom had pledged to appoint a black woman to the seat should Feinstein not complete her term, and he's now appointed Emily's List president LaFonza Butler. Elliot, why don't you kick us off? Why did Newsom make the appointment that he did? I mean...
Like along what dimension? He has to fill a seat, so he has to make an appointment. What about her is surprising enough to ask about? So, of course, the left wanted him to appoint Barbara Lee because she's already running and she is a black woman. There were, I think there were predictions that it would be Shirley Weber because she's a black woman and people supposed that she's
Gavin Newsom wouldn't want to put too much of a finger on the race. And the expectation was that if she was appointed, she wouldn't actually run in 2024. And this, you know, primary between Schiff, Porter and Lee could play out as previously expected.
There were conspiracy theorists who thought he would appoint the vice president of the United States so that he could fill that role and become the president of the United States when Joe Biden stepped down while we're living in the House of Cards universe. And he ultimately went with somebody who I don't think was on a lot of people's radar, whose residence is actually in Maryland, not California, and has no elected experience. So I guess that's where my question of,
why LaFonza Butler? There's lots of coalitional thinking that goes into filling high-profile vacant Senate seats, right? So he pledged to pick a Black woman. That's probably to satisfy the desires for descriptive representation in the largest minority group in the Democratic Party, right? Or at least the
the largest and most democratic. So you can think like, what's another large group in the Democratic Party? Like women are. So she's the president of Emily's List, right? So maybe you also pick someone... And he said this in his post, right? In his Twitter post or...
X.com post, whatever we're calling it, that she spent her career fighting for women. I mean, that's like a pretty strong sign to women that you're like on their side while also satisfying other parts of the coalition. I mean, that'd be like my first, that'd be my prior. That's my first guess. I'm not Gavin Newsom. She's also gay. And this, she's going to be the first...
gay black woman to serve in the Senate. And I'm pretty sure the first gay senator from California, double check me though on that for sure. That is the case. The gayest state finally gets a gay representative. No, I think the gay, well, the gayest territory. The gayest state. The gayest territory is Washington, D.C. And then it's probably Massachusetts or something like that after that. But no, we have talked on this podcast about the gayest congressional district, which used to be my congressional district, New York's 10th district, although it was
Then you moved out of it. I didn't move out of it. It moved out of me. Okay. Anyway, Nathaniel, do you have thoughts on all of this? I think you do because you were the most adamant that it was going to be Shirley Weber. So you must be the most surprised here. Yeah. It just, it seemed like a lot of the obvious names didn't seem interested in the job. Right. So like Shirley Weber, the secretary of state of California basically said like, it would be hard for me to accept like a temporary post. Like,
London breed, the mayor of San Francisco basically said she wasn't interested. Karen Bass, the mayor of Los Angeles was just elected and I don't know why she would go for it. So I think that kind of forced Newsome to pick somebody without elected experience, which I think it actually, like I give him points for kind of picking a name that nobody
wasn't on anybody's radar he found somebody who like is well connected in california politics who like we mentioned like you know is like very connected in like women's groups and like you know the abortion issue which is obviously a big one for democrats these days um
the residency thing. And as a former union leader. So during our hot labor. Yeah, former union leader. Exactly. I guess it's no longer summer, but you know, in our hot labor 2023 sort of jives with the move. Also did some consulting for Uber though. Airbnb. Which was interesting. Yeah. Um,
Like, yeah, very California, right? You know, Uber and SEIU. But I think the main issue that came up basically immediately on Sunday after the news was leaked about her was her residency in Maryland. And apparently she also has a house in California, but she had registered to vote in Maryland because as president of EMILY's List, she lives in the D.C. suburbs. And so that's not a great look. And I think the real question, of course, now is whether she runs for a full term and
If she does, then the residency thing I think is a big problem for her. If she doesn't, then it's kind of just maybe bad optics for Newsom and maybe he didn't do his homework or maybe it was the kind of thing where like they didn't like scrub her Twitter bio, which said that she was lived in Maryland and her bio on emilyslist.com or .org that said that she lived in Maryland and that was just kind of an embarrassing mistake, but something that...
can be remedied quickly if she's not running. There is an element of smart politics on Newsom's part here too, which because this allows him to not have to pick a side in the very contentious primary for the general election Senate seat. So maybe that had gone into it as well. But that also doesn't help him per se, because there are a lot of, I mean, the Congressional Black Caucus is infuriated right now that he didn't pick Barbara Lee. I think a lot of people
sort of following, you know, the situation thought he would pick Barbara Lee and that that was going to be the thing that really boosted her above, you know, an Adam Schiff who has raised a ton of money and seems to be, you know, doing really well in terms of trying to replace Feinstein. And now that he has decided not to choose Lee or anyone who's running in the race, there's a lot of black lawmakers on the Hill who are furious with him. So if he was trying to be Switzerland, didn't exactly work.
So we don't know if LaFonza Butler will run for reelection. And I don't know that there are that many sort of crumbs that we can pick up at this point to get a sense of whether she would. I mean...
There's not necessarily any reason to believe that she wouldn't if, you know, Senator from California is a pretty good job within the Democratic Party. And there were no, as Gavin Newsom's office mentioned, no preconditions to being chosen for this post in terms of being a caretaker and not running again. So maybe the more important question for our purposes is if she did choose to run for election in 2024, would she have...
an incumbent advantage. And I know this is an area where we've done work in the past, Nathaniel. No, she wouldn't. So yeah, so you're right. Like, I think it's a really interesting question. The points in favor of her running are the fact that basically a couple of hours before her appointment was announced, it was also reported that Newsom is not putting preconditions to say you can't run. So that...
seems kind of obvious. There's also the fact that she is very young. She's 44 years old. But then on the other side of the ledger, there is, I think, this residency thing, which I think would be a big problem for her. And I also think there's the fact that like she comes from this cloth of like she's like an operative, right? And like there's a long history of,
interim senators being appointed who are like, you know, the was the longtime chief of staff of like the person that they're replacing or something like that. People who are operatives but don't see their career as like the main person. They're the person behind the scenes. And, you know, I don't know Lafonza Butler, but like it seems like that has been her career so far. Maybe she is interested in making the jump into electoral politics. And this is obviously a great opportunity. But honestly, it
Political politics doesn't seem very appealing to me personally. And for somebody who maybe has been in the trenches about it, maybe she's also similarly cynical about it. Anyway, to answer your question, Galen, no. So the really important thing, a really interesting thing is that we have looked at this question multiple times. Political scientists have looked at this question multiple times.
And people who are appointed to the Senate and then run for a full term do not enjoy the incumbent advantage that an elected incumbent enjoys. There are lots of examples like Luther Strange or Martha McSally of those people trying to run and then losing. And, you know, I think a part of this is the fact that
The incumbent advantage does come from, you know, there's obviously there is some advantage to having name recognition. I do think that if LaFonza Butler decided to jump into the race without this appointment, a lot of people would be like, who? And now she has the name recognition of being a senator or she will have the name recognition of being a senator. But.
She hasn't faced voters before. She hasn't faced the rigors of a campaign before. And that is where a lot of the incumbent advantage comes from. If she gets in, obviously, that will change the contours. But as they currently stand, we don't have a lot of polling. Essentially, the polling that we do have suggests that Adam Schiff and Katie Porter are close to being tied. So a recent Spectre News poll showed Adam Schiff leading slightly at 20 percent, Porter at 17 percent, and Barbara Lee at 7 percent. I mean, this is going to be a
And of course, California has a top two primary system. So there could end up being two Democrats who go to the general election if a Republican doesn't come in second. I think especially given the lack of incumbent advantage for appointed senators, if I'm Adam Schiff, who I would call the front runner at this point, I am not feeling significantly more worried than I was a couple of days ago.
All right, before we wrap, we have one more thing to get to, which is outlier polls. And I mentioned this on last week's podcast, but our colleagues at ABC News, along with The Washington Post, published a poll about a week ago showing former President Trump leading President Biden by nine points amongst adults in a hypothetical 2024 matchup.
That got a lot of attention, of course, because that is a more favorable number for Trump than many other polls showing, most other polls showing pretty much a dead heat. And I have said this a million times at this point, but it is, of course, still more than a year out from the actual election. So this is what we usually call an outlier poll. And Elliot, you wrote on the FiveThirtyEight website about what to do with polls like this.
So give us a little 101 as we enter the part of the four-year election cycle where, you know, folks increasingly tune in to, you know, shock poll, X or Y person leads by A or B amount. Yeah, I mean, I think the polling 101, like your first, if you're in a polling 101 course, your first class is just going to be like,
Take an average. That's just the simplest approach here. I'll talk about some of the complexities within that statement, but I think it helps for people to understand maybe more where the outlier polls come from. What are all the sources of error in a poll? Because there's a lot more than people commonly assume or are presented with. So, you know, like you go on this ABC News Washington Post poll, right? You see a three and a half percentage point margin of error. That's what the pollster tells us. That number captures how
Off the poll could be from reality or how much the results of the poll could change if they conducted the poll again 20 times. And so in this case, a nine point margin for Donald Trump in the poll could be as low as like three ish percentage points. It depends exactly upon how you do the math here.
or it could be even bigger. So that right there, I think is a good way into this conversation about how precise this number is. And the answer is it's really not all that precise. Polls just in general, a single poll are subject to that initial batch of, this is called sampling error. That's what the margin of error captures. That's just like the randomness
in the pollster sample. They could get too many black people or politically unrepresentative young people or whatever, and then pollsters have their tricks to equalize those numbers, but it can lead to some weird results.
Layered on top of that is something that we in the polling business call non-sampling error. That is error that's caused by different groups being disproportionately likely to not show up in a poll. And usually we talk about this in the non-response context. That's you explicitly refusing to take a pollster's call.
There's a couple of other different sources of error that are non-sampling. That's like your question might be worded incorrectly. That is also called measurement error. You're like not measuring something correctly. Or there's just like this weird statistical fluke in how the poll gets done that year. And point being all of that extra error is like twice as much as the original margin of error that upholster tells you. So in this case,
The ABC News Washington Post polling team tells us, oh, this margin of error is three and a half points. I see that number and I think, oh, it's actually closer to six or seven because of all the extra randomness, non-randomness, just noise that can go on. And you apply that frame of mind to every poll that you see.
Yeah, because like they're messy. It's just, it's a scientific research question with a less than 1% response rate, depending on how you calculate this. So I know that's a lot for like people to hold in their head, but basically every time you see a poll, you should assume for an average poll that one single percentage point could be like six or 7% off of the real number in the population. That means for, for,
a margin between candidates, it can be like double digits, 14 points easy.
So that's why you have to average them together. That's why it's so important to take multiple polls from multiple people. Well, I think a lot of people will take what you're saying and be like, oh, so you're saying this, you know, if it's a Democrat reacting to this poll, who are, I guess, most of the people reacting sort of in a negative way to this poll, they'd say, oh, Elliot just told me that basically this poll means nothing. So basically, I'm going to apply this frame of reasoning.
mind to any polls that I don't like that I can just deem to be outliers. And so I think maybe where we get into trouble is when people see a polling result that they don't like, or that doesn't match the consensus or even the average, and they say, oh, that must be an outlier. There must be either sampling error or non-response measuring error, non-response error, and
So what are indicators that something is an outlier poll that should be viewed as suspect versus maybe a leading indicator that the consensus is wrong, especially living in a world where the past two presidential elections, the polls have been quite off?
There's a statistical answer here, which is that leading indicators tend to be closer to the average and come with a couple of other polls later. Whereas like a true outlier that's like 10 or 20 percentage points off from your outlier or from your average, you can have less trust in that than a poll that's like four or five points off. That's pretty likely still to be a real poll. Yeah.
I mean, again, like not everyone is a polling scientist here, but like we try to be, we try to be. So one of the things that I like to do is look into the crosstabs of a poll. I don't want to like encourage people to be crosstab truthers here, like unskew the polls. But if there's some fundamental disagreement in polls,
the percents of people that say they're voting, they would vote for a certain political party over another. If those percents are in disagreement with what we know about people from other polls, other studies of the electorate, or our dearly held priors as good Bayesians who also look at other data that's not polling data,
Then that poll, like then you have a pretty good reason, honestly, to be suspicious of that poll. Like I said, there's so much noise. It's very susceptible to weirdness in the sample. So if you get a poll that has like Democrats, Trump winning Democrats by 10 points, then you can be suspicious of it. That's totally fair game.
Okay, I think we do. We are getting into like slightly dangerous territory here where people will be like, I don't know, this doesn't really make sense. I can't imagine that Republicans are actually going to win 35 to 40% of the Hispanic vote. And then all of a sudden the election happens and they do. And it's just our sort of priors prevented us from accurately reporting a realignment or a shift in the electorate. And so like, how do you sort of straddle
the skepticism with keeping an open mind in an ever-changing world. Very eloquently put. I mean, that's what the average is for, really. The answer is you should treat any one poll pretty skeptically. But if you have four or five polls that show Trump winning 45% of the Hispanic vote, by the way, it could be higher, right? Then...
you can take those multiple measures with a lot more confidence. I mean, what people shouldn't hear from this is that you can go off and question the polling consensus using outliers. That's quite the wrong lesson from this. You should be trusting the average poll. And if there's an outlier that's in tension with,
a lot of other polls, then like as a good, as a good statistical Bayesian, you have to question whether or not it's a legitimate reading. Honestly, my recommendation is just not to look at the crosstabs at all because crosstabs also, you know, we, Ellie talked about kind of the true margin of error of a poll. Crosstabs are smaller samples and they have even bigger margins of errors and they can be off by quite a bit. And it doesn't necessarily mean the whole poll is junk. I just look frankly at a poll that is, you know,
shows, you know, say Trump leading by 10 points and the average is Biden plus two. And I say that is by definition an outlier. And I don't throw it out. I remember in the back of my head that it was a thing. And if there are other polls that show movement toward Trump, then I pull it back out and say, aha, maybe this was a leading indicator. But I don't think that's something you can know in advance. But you still put it in the average either way. Exactly right. You still put it in the average.
it nudges things maybe toward Trump a little bit, but then they'll probably, you know, if assuming that it is indeed just kind of a statistical quirk, there'll probably be a Biden plus 10 poll that comes down the pike and then that'll move the average back. And so you just kind of have to trust the process. There's an element to what we do that's just like,
Everyone chill, like just wait, wait for a couple more polls to go in the average, see if it moves and then make your judgments about politics. People expect us to have lots of answers because we're like the data people. But a lot of the times the proper analysis of the data is just like everyone freaking chill out.
Yeah. And I mean, the other thing I'll add is that in this case, obviously, we are more than a year out from the election. We don't have nominees yet. Historically, polls at this point are not predictive. But I think basically, like the idea is that and like it's also a season where we're not getting that many polls. And so people will see one poll and then they'll freak out about it for a long time and it'll have more staying power in the news. Whereas if this were October 2024, when a time when polls are predictive, we'd be getting a ton of polls all the time. We'd know very quickly whether it was an outlier.
I don't know how long you've been in this industry, but if we got this poll in October of 2024, I can promise you the fever pitch of freak out would be at least 20 times the fever pitch of freak out this past week. Sure, we'd have a lot more data. I mean, and that would be fair because polls at that point are predictive. Whereas right now, like I think there's a good argument for just not paying attention to them at all. But we'd also have a lot more data like very quickly to point at being like, this is or isn't an outlier.
Rachel, have we sufficiently bored you at this point? I have so much admiration for you guys. I mean, I hated math growing up, but like, thank God for you guys because I don't know any of this sh*t. It's like, "Whoo!" over my head. And most days, I wish I didn't know any of it either. Um, I'm kidding. I'm kidding. I'm kidding. I'm kidding. I'm kidding. Keep listening. Keep reading. It's all important stuff. God's work, truly. Um, okay.
That has brought this podcast to a conclusion. Thank you, Rachel, Elliot, and Nathaniel so much for joining me today. I hope you had some fun and we'll chat again soon. Thanks, Galen.
Awesome. I'm going to go think about the Roman Empire while I'm chasing Matt Gaetz down. If you can ask Matt Gaetz about the Roman Empire, that'd be great for us. Okay. All right. Anyway, my name is Galen Drew. Tony Chow is in the control room. You can get in touch by emailing us at podcasts at 538.com. You can also, of course, tweet us with any questions or comments. If you're a fan of the show, leave us a rating or review in the Apple podcast store or tell someone about us. Thanks for listening. And we will see you soon. Bye.
